{"id":626083,"date":"2026-02-26T14:02:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T14:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/626083\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T14:02:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T14:02:14","slug":"how-nbas-tanking-problem-reached-breaking-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/626083\/","title":{"rendered":"How NBA’s tanking problem reached breaking point"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roughly six weeks remain in the NBA regular season. If we\u2019re lucky, it will be the final six weeks of the league\u2019s decades-long tanking plague.<\/p>\n

In Thursday night\u2019s slate, six of the 10 games feature at least one team with no interest in picking up a win, but commissioner Adam Silver has offered hope that next season could look different, reportedly telling every front office<\/a> that the league will soon institute stronger anti-tanking measures.<\/p>\n

The potential options reportedly include: freezing lottery odds at the trade deadline or a different date, not allowing teams to make top-four picks in consecutive drafts, limiting lottery protections, basing lottery odds on two-year records, placing play-in teams in the lottery and flattening the odds for all lottery teams.<\/p>\n

These aren\u2019t solutions, but they\u2019re a start. There are no easy fixes. If so, they\u2019d already be here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Roughly six weeks remain in the NBA regular season. If we\u2019re lucky, it will be the final six…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626084,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2214,7,4517,6,12,249,3823,66,196],"class_list":["post-626083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-adam-silver","tag-basketball","tag-beyond-the-back-page","tag-nba","tag-nba-draft","tag-nba-draft-lottery","tag-post-sports-newsletters","tag-sports","tag-sports-plus"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116137305362345937","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}